Languishing in the Waiting Room of Life?

In your suffering now, there are those doing life easy. It can seem so unfair. But over the years, life has a way of evening the score. In your suffering, rather than rage at the injustice, rest, and resolve to be equipped to help others who will be blindsided by grief in the future.

But how does one acceptably rest?

I love what Jodie L Alexander-Platt writes in comparing suffering to being in a waiting room in an emergency department of a hospital:

“We can wrestle with our suffering, be impatiently disgruntled that others are being attended to before us, or we can take the time to tune our heart to God’s good grace. In grace we rest. In His rest we have peace.”

Isn’t that eloquent? And true.

The worst days of our lives are punctuated by pain that seems so untenable that we cannot rationalise it as being within the realm of living experience.

Days such as these we have moments that hardly seem real for the pain we bear. And yet moments as these are surreal for how painful they are. We look with complete disconnection to others’ realities that seem normal and so far away from our reality.

Those who endure pain that very few humans bear, for that time, endure what is completely unreal, because it’s an experience of life they barely believe is happening, just as it’s an experience that nobody else can connect with. It is out of this world, and only God can comprehend it.

It’s what is so often termed being in liminal space. It’s an in-between time where we hardly feel alive, and may very well feel completely dead to all hope and reason and life. It feels as if our lives are over and it feels as if no hope remains. And it’s confusing, for every moment seems so unpredictable.

And then we flux into a sense of living in grief that at least can resent the reality for the fact of others enjoying life when we aren’t.

Tuning our hearts to God’s good grace, we choose to rest in this grace that we must begin to believe actually exists. Why? Because of the testimony of others, we know it must exist. So we choose to be open to it. We rest in this grace; to acknowledge that what we may not feel or experience is real, for others have experienced it as their truth, and we too know that there must be something more to this experience of suffering; that a good God would not leave us nor forsake us in this. And in that is peace.

If you find yourself in this way-station of life that feels like death, it won’t always be that way.

Photo by Kleiton Silva on Unsplash